Jacob Ridley, Senior Hardware Editor
This week I: I’m visiting my home country of Wales in the metaverse. Ah, after all this AI stuff, you forgot about metadata, huh?
How did we get ourselves into this mess? A handful of companies claim to control a service to which billions of people around the world contribute. We’ve become so dependent on Google to point us in the right direction that the company can now have a sense of ownership over the content it’s supposed to point us towards. A handful of executives at Google shouldn’t have the power to change the internet, but they’re doing it anyway. These. And it seems there is little we can do to stop them.
At Google I/O this week, Google announced many new features coming to Google Search; the most notable of which was the Artificial Intelligence Overview. These are designed to respond faster to user queries: you type or say a query into Google search, Google finds an answer and creates an answer. It’s right there on the page.
“Google will Google the search for you,” says Liz Reid, Google’s head of Search.
Google’s artificial intelligence model Gemini is key to this. It relies on using the world’s most detailed and comprehensive knowledge library to provide its users with answers: We.
Google acts as the gatekeeper of the internet, not only because it provides us with instructions on where to go for information, but also because it serves up lots of ads. The money goes into the publishers’ pockets, which leads to paying for more content. I admit it’s a rosy view of the worrying and diverse publishing business, but that’s generally the way things work. Sprinkle in some cash flow from affiliate marketing and you have the earnings report of many non-ecommerce websites.
So what happens when a publisher gets fewer page views on their content? Risks increase, investment money decreases, advertising becomes worse and content becomes more desperate to attract visitors. The ‘enrichment’ of the Internet is ultimately a financial matter.
And Google has a say in everything. It is at the center of the internet, whether you use its services frequently or not. This has become an issue in various ways over the years as the company tries to find new ways to deliver information and make money through its internet index Search.
First ads. The information from the websites is then presented directly on the search page. It was this behavior that got Google into trouble with many countries and even the EU. The legislation, adopted by the European bloc’s member states, hoped to prevent Google from hijacking content without giving publishers fair compensation for their work. Google responded by completely removing or threatening to remove its services from some countries. Google News was only brought back online in Spain in 2022.
With the advent of Google’s AI-powered search feature, we may be about to find out what happens when Google reduces a publisher’s ability to generate viable revenue. And the results are unlikely to be pretty.
Google says of the change: “As we expand this experience, we’ll continue to focus on sending valuable traffic to publishers and creators.” This one sentence in a sea of AI news, with no further explanation of how it plans to do this beyond a handful of links to ultimately read more. Reid suggested noting that ahead of I/O, he expects there to be an increase in rejected traffic from users looking to dig deeper into the topics AI provides answers to, but it remains to be seen whether that will happen.
Google suggests that it will only start offering AI Overviews where it sees the most benefit from its use. Although there is nothing clearly preventing gradual expansion into more of the traditional search engine.
It’s easy to see why many people are concerned that Google has broken from its previous form and refused to refund publishers. New York Times, “Can Google Deliver AI Answers Without Breaking the Web?” He published an article titled. The NYT is currently filing a lawsuit against OpenAI over the use of its articles to train chatbots.
Similarly, Google’s CEO was questioned about whether the company was interested in OpenAI using YouTube videos to train rival models. I’d be surprised if Google wanted to join this fight, given its position in AI.
The problem ultimately stems from a larger problem with AI: who can freely collect data for use in training and operating AI systems? Video, image and text copyright holders have raised alarm over mass data collection for training artificial intelligence systems. But now we are talking about collecting, processing and reusing information in real time. There is no protection against copyright infringement in UK law for removing stories taking facts published by others, provided they are not copied in a similar way except in quotes. This means there’s no obvious solution to Google’s latest features.
A publisher can use tags to disable many of Google’s rich results features. This is also apparently Disqualify content from being used by AI Overviews. However, the AI Overview takes up a portion of the search results page, pushing down naturally occurring content that has been gradually demoted to lower spots over the years. However, Google may have tweaked the size to make it more suitable, and may have already done so during earlier development. This feature is not completely new.
But Google should be challenged for what it is doing. Not at all, because it seems to disregard Google’s own recommendations on how to create good content. As the company that holds the keys to the internet, publishers have long had to listen to Google’s advice on how to appear on its platform. He recommends that creators follow four basic principles: EAT.
E for experience, E for expertise, A for authoritarianism, T for reliability.
How quickly can these be achieved with fewer readers, fewer views, less money, and an AI that bends over and copies everyone’s answers for Google’s own benefit? It might work for a while, then the money rolls in and the content inevitably gets worse. At what point does the reduction of original content lead to a terrible user experience with Google’s Search AI returning incorrect answers? Some might argue that this is already pretty weak and doing this today.
Not to mention the risk of misinformation from a third party (Google) coming in and refuting the words to erode the credibility the individual publisher has earned.
Why would Google benefit from the labor of others for a system that is increasingly pitted against real creators? I would love to know.
Everyone who has a stake in the internet deserves a change of their own. A shift away from megacorporations that claim to run businesses and towards communities of people willing to share their thoughts and space with others. The Internet was not created by Google and not improved by Google. More than ever, there’s a feeling that Google is just getting in the way.